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Tag: firefox

I’m a Firefox user since the 1.0 days. I did my part for the GetFirefox.com campaign when working at Emerson College helpdesk and getting people away from IE 6.

Since then I have moved on to Chrome as my primary browser, but I still use Firefox for the Something Awful forums extension, various HTML developer extensions, and my Ümloud! logins (preventing acidental personal posts). I also started using 1Password (a future post!) for better security across all my browsers. The key component to my Firefox use are the extensions (also known as Add-ons).

When Firefox first rolled out extensions, the API asked developers to limit what version the extension would work for. An extension for Firefox 3 wouldn’t work on 4. This forced developers to test the new browser and for users to update when needed. That way extensions wouldn’t soft-fail on users, causing them to think the browser is broken when the fault was the extension. This process was fine when major Firefox releases were around a year or more.

Recently Firefox started going on a version number release schedule similar to Chrome: Release early and very often. Major version number updates occur in a span of months or weeks. This is fine, but flies against extensions. An extension that got updated for the shipping version won’t work on a beta. The updating messages aren’t removable; just “ask later”. Now I have to pick between seeing update messages every time I launch, or break extension support.

So we need two things to happen here:

Make a third “wait till it’s released, not beta” option.

Extensions move away from version numbers and more to capability testing.

While the “not beta” option should be there in any case, we’re starting to see a change that the old versioning system isn’t paired with the change of development schedule. Without knowing too much about the extension system, I can’t help but think of the disastrous history of using User Agent strings to assume capabilities. The better approach is using something like Modernizr1 which tests what a browser can do, rather than the name/version of a browser. That way when a browser with a different name, but capable of the require actions, can still work. Past, present, and future.

Sadly, I can’t wait for these things to happen. Which sadly means on my Mac, I’ll be using Safari as my Ümloud! browser and only venturing into Firefox when I absolutely need to use an extension, assuming it still works…